Is bounced-around human life like this Betta fish's? — a musing on selective randomness

© 2018 Peter Free

 

14 April 2018

 

 

Regarding my Betta fish's existence

 

A blue Betta came to me as an unexpected gift. In a cracked and leaking tiny glass bowl. Had I not caught the damage, his life would have dribbled away with the escaping water.

 

I transferred him to a larger Pyrex container. He waited there, bored to tears, for a 40 gallon aquarium to arrive.

 

When it came, I set it up with black sand, blue-green quartz rocks and some plants.

 

Betta heaven, I presume.

 

I trained him to eat in a set place in the tank. Once a day, I turned the canister filter's water flow off as a signal. He'd dash over to the front right corner of the tank. And I'd dish out his pellets or dried blood worms, one by one. That way, none of them made it to the bottom of the tank to rot and produce noxious ammonia.

 

I wondered what he "thought" about this.

 

Religion or cosmology?

 

As time passed, the high silicate load in our tap water prompted brown diatom strands to grow. These did not go away the way they usually do, when an aquarium cycles into a more mature bacteria load.

 

Cleaning the tall 40 gallon every week proved to be messy. Too many dripping bucket loads of water going back and forth, just to be able to reach the tank bottom.

 

During the more thorough of these cleanups, meaning the ones in which everything was removed and scrubbed, the Betta lived temporarily in Refugee Camp containers.

 

What did he think about these tornado-like changes in living conditions?

 

To reduce the regularity of bucket-traveling-floor-drip messes, I replaced the 40 with a shallow 25.

 

But now, the aquarium light was much closer to everything. Green algae joined brown diatoms in producing even more voluminous messes.

 

Cleaning just once a week was no longer enough.

 

I did what most fresh water aquarists do. I bought some algae eaters. Five nerite snails and five Amano shrimp.

 

That would do it, right?

 

Create a workable ecosystem existing happily on its own, without my quasi-divine intervention?

 

Nah.

 

The Betta hated the new guys. He acted like the imperial United States does and started attacking everything that had the audacity to exist in defiance of his parameters.

 

I had to put Betta in a bucket.

 

He hated that, too.

 

And sat moping on the green pail's bottom. Probably plotting revenge against the Forces of Creation.

 

The following day, I took him out of the "no sights to see" torture container and into the same Pyrex bowl that he had been in 5 months before.

 

Photograph of blue Betta fish in a Pyrex measuring bowl, waiting for his new aquarium.

 

What did he surmise about that?

 

Life's circularity?

 

When the pet store opened, I got him a new 5.5 gallon aquarium.

 

He's in it now and happier than he was in the bucket. He can look out at the same view he had before.

 

Is the lesson here is that imperialists need to be confined for Harmony's sake?

 

Certainly, I did not want to tolerate unpleasantness of an out of control algae farm, just because Betta refused to get along with new water mates.

 

Some of the wily shrimp sought refuge in the all-in-one aquarium's built in sump. Now that the Blue Terrorist is confined somewhere else, I will have to fish them out of there. That is, if they managed to avoid getting sucked and flattened inside the aquarium's powerful canister filter.

 

It's always something.

 

Which may, or may not, be the point.

 

 

Parallels?

 

If you were in the Betta's tiny head, what would you be thinking about all this?

 

He knows when I'm around because of my shadow. He used to hang out at the aquarium side that has a distant view of one of the house windows. He watches what's going on outside the tank, when the aquarium light is off and his reflection disappears.

 

I can see him enthusiastically react to people passing by.

 

Are they gods — or God — or something else?

 

Does it matter?

 

 

The moral? — You get my drift

 

What we think we know is limited by our abilities to perceive and analyze. Explanatory stories weave imagined sense into selectively random happenings. Those are probably caused by circumstances that we are unaware of.

 

As a thought experiment, try to disprove the suspicion that we are a computer simulation.

 

You won't be able to. Any more than the Betta can.

 

We could (perhaps even should) wonder what happenstance and necessarily limited intelligence have to do with our lives and others.

 

I do not think that any of this is as clear as most people would have it.

 

I watch the Betta swim. Compassion for both of us rises.

 

Like the flow of water and air.